Short-lived return saw Tay tweet about smoking drugs in front of the police before suffering a meltdown and being taken offline

Microsoft’s attempt to converse with millennials using an artificial intelligence bot plugged into Twitter made a short-lived return on Wednesday, before bowing out again in some sort of meltdown.

The learning experiment, which got a crash-course in racism,
Holocaust denial and sexism courtesy of Twitter users, was switched back
on overnight and appeared to be operating in a more sensible fashion. Microsoft
had previously gone through the bot’s tweets and removed the most
offensive and vowed only to bring the experiment back online if the
company’s engineers could “better anticipate malicious intent that
conflicts with our principles and values”.